October 2016

Monday, October 10, 2016

I watched the debate last night and, particularly at the beginning, was ashamed. Ashamed to be an American, ashamed for the Republican party, ashamed for my country which is now faced with choosing between a pig and a pig's wife for President. God help us, for many reasons.

Someone whose opinions I once respected, whose opinions I've shared on these pages, who considers himself a conservative and, because of my #NeverTrump status, considers me anything but, was moved to suggest that my opposition to his political savior, particularly in light of my expressed disgust in the audio tapes released days ago, made me a bonafide member of the Party of Caiaphas, his accompanying explanation relaying that Christ fought against the power structures of His day and that I, because I opposed Trump, opposed that same fight today.

Think on that... my opposition to Trump was, in the eyes of this supporter, opposition to Christ-likeness and put me on par with the high priest and his merry band of Christ-killers. Yup. And he meant it but... didn't stop there.

My strong disgust with Trump's view of women, and oh by the way, Bill Clinton's view of women, makes me a sexist because... are you ready for this... expressing the notion that all men should treat all women with dignity "commands us to think of all women as the same" and "the truth is, you can't get more sexist than that."

Now think on that... my belief in the words expressed by St. John Paul II in the graphic above make me and by extension, every faithful Catholic and many others, sexists.

I've come to a conclusion, one I've held for some time now, that Donald Trump isn't the problem. The man's rise to stardom within the Republican Party, his support among particularly Evangelicals and especially far too many Catholics, is symptomatic of something far deeper, far more troubling, far more sinister.

For 80 years, the Deseret News has not entered into the troubled waters of presidential endorsement. We are neutral on matters of partisan politics. We do, however, feel a duty to speak clearly on issues that affect the well-being and morals of the nation.

Accordingly, today we call on Donald Trump to step down from his pursuit of the American presidency.

In democratic elections, ideas have consequences, leadership matters and character counts.

The idea that women secretly welcome the unbridled and aggressive sexual advances of powerful men has led to the mistreatment, sorrow and subjugation of countless women for far too much of human history.

The belief that the party and the platform matter more than the character of the candidate ignores the wisdom of the ages that, “when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” (Proverbs 29:2)

We understand that politicians and presidential candidates are human and that everyone makes mistakes. We do not believe that what is expressed in an unguarded moment of conversation should be the full measure of an individual. And we unquestionably support the principle that people deserve forgiveness, compassion and a second chance.

But history affirms that leaders' examples either elevate or demean the lives of those being led. When choosing the ostensible leader of the free world, the American electorate requires the clear assurance that their chosen candidate will consistently put the well-being of others ahead of his or her own personal gratification. The most recent revelations of Trump’s lewdness disturb us not only because of his vulgar objectification of women, but also because they poignantly confirm Trump’s inability to self-govern.

What oozes from this audio is evil. We hear a married man give smooth, smug and self-congratulatory permission to his intense impulses, allowing them to outweigh the most modest sense of decency, fidelity and commitment. And although it speaks volumes about sexual morality, it goes to the heart of all ethical behavior. Trump’s banter belies a willingness to use and discard other human beings at will. That characteristic is the essence of a despot.

We are faced with choices today. At a time when all the short-term incentives point toward unreason, our leaders, political and cultural, must choose reason. At a time when group solidarity is trumping individual accountability, we must choose individual accountability. At a time when the loudest voices don’t wait for evidence to make sweeping judgments, we must wait for the evidence.

...

When we tribalize conflict, we create a tribalized society. It’s that simple. Stop lying and distorting facts for your own short-term political gain. It has been extraordinary to watch so many on the left and the right disregard the truth for the sake of “larger purposes.” A known lie such as “hands-up, don’t shoot” became the slogan of an entire movement. Scaremongers refused to deal with actual statistics and instead perpetuated the claim that police officers had declared “open season” on black men. Comprehensive reporting shows that police overwhelmingly use force when they are “under attack or defending someone who [is].” Despite the millions of interactions between police and citizens (including black citizens), the number of controversial or contentious shootings is low. It’s so low that in a nation of more than 300 million citizens, we can rattle off individual names – Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner – rather than consider the horror of mass death, of a true “open season.”

At the same time, it’s just as dishonest to pretend that police abuse is a fiction or that official racism has been vanquished. It is a simple fact that some police departments have covered up police misconduct (McDonald’s case comes immediately to mind) or, typically at the behest of their political masters, systematically abused the citizens they’re sworn to protect, turning them into ATMs for the state through excessive and burdensome fines and citations. While the Department of Justice’s investigation of the police shooting of Michael Brown exonerated officer Darren Wilson, for example, it painted an extraordinarily disturbing portrait of the use and abuse of official power in Ferguson, Missouri. Police made Ferguson a hell for its residents, a place where, as I wrote at the time, “a small class of the local power brokers creat[ed] two sets of rules, one for the connected and another for the mass of people who are forced – often at gunpoint – to pay for the ‘privilege’ of being governed.” No American man, woman, or child should have to live under such a regime. But the problem will never be solved if we refuse to acknowledge its complexities. No debate that so reflexively distorts reality will ever be productive.

...

Condemning the evil men and women who affiliate themselves with Black Lives Matter – people who tweet out applause for cop-killings – should not stop us from acknowledging that movement’s many more protesters who abhor violence and weep sincerely for the police lives lost last night. Condemning those cops who are bigoted should not stop us from acknowledging the many more cops who willingly lay down their lives for all citizens every single day. People of good faith can and should disagree about how best to prevent more lives from being lost in the future. But nothing will get better until everyone first recognizes that those with whom they disagree are people of good faith.

I've seen some of this tribalization in my own social media newsfeed today. People pouring gasoline on the flames. It's sickening, depressing, disgusting. And though I agree completely with Mr. French, I go a step further.

What ails this once great country will take divine healing. There's no way to get around this. It's factual. It's obvious. It's real.

We should all cry out for that healing, and there's no better way in my view for that to take place than to petition those who've been recognized by the Church as dispensers of that healing.

Monday, June 20, 2016

In one of the most cogent and analytical responses to the Orlando terrorist attack, Stephen Turley provides insights to what, if not corrected, will be the deathknell of western culture:

Why does our society find it so difficult to blame radical jihadists for the murders they commit?

I think the key to understanding this incoherence can be found in what scholars call a “risk society,” which refers to the unique ways in which modern people deal with hazards and insecurities as they relate to the future. There are two reasons for why we moderns are unique in the way we handle potential threats and hazards:

First, we are more reliant on scientific and technological processes in our day-to-day living than any previous society. Science and technology have penetrated into virtually every aspect of our lives, from the moment we wake up to a digital alarm and turn on our lights, to making our cup of coffee and microwaving our breakfasts, to driving to work to sitting at a computer sending out emails and texts on our smart phones.

However, secondly, this technological age comes at a cost: technology-based societies tend to reject traditional moral conceptions of life. This is because technology is organized and governed by modern scientific processes which are considered value neutral and thus devoid of moral frames of reference. So, in many respects, we are living in what we might call a “post-traditional” or “post-moral age.” Indeed, this is why we have LGBT values, which are not found in traditional moral societies, in the first place.

And so, these scientific and technological processes have opened up to us a whole new future of unprecedented possibilities and potentialities, but without the aid of traditional morality to guide us into this brave new world.

So now that we are in this post-moral, post-traditional society, the question is: Whom do we blame when massacres like Orlando occur? Post-moral societies basically have two options: They can blame material and environmental factors or they can blame the previous moral tradition that once dominated society but is now reinterpreted as inherently oppressive.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

In a previous post Rick questioned whether we can help Syrian refugees and at the same time fight Jihadists.

Over at Ace's Place we get some answers from the Obama administration –

Advocates for resettling tens of thousands of Syrians in the US say the process is robust, thorough and extensive. But in the end the reality is you can only check people's backgrounds against the information you have and when it comes to Syrians we don't have much.

But one of the senior administration officials at Tuesday’s briefing acknowledged the limitations inherent in screening refugees from Syria, where it’s very difficult to determine something as basic as an applicant’s criminal history.

“We do the best with what we have,” the official said. “We talk to people about what their criminal histories are, and we hear about that. That’s pretty much where we are.”

FBI Director James Comey, flanked by the nation’s top intelligence officials, admitted to the House Homeland Security Committee Wednesday that for some of the 10,000 Syrian refugees the administration has agreed to allow into the U.S., there will be no basis to vet them through the databases it uses to determine if they have ties to terrorism.

“We can only query against that which we have collected, and so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interests reflected in our database, we can query our database til the cows come home, but … there’ll be nothing show up, because we have no record on that person,” said Comey.

“We’ve gotten better at that over the last couple of years, but it is a time-consuming process and one of the challenges that we’ll have is that we’re not going to know a whole lot about the individual refugees that come forward.”

The "gotten better" part is important because, let's just say there's a lot of room for improvement in the screening process.

Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The discovery in 2009 of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky -- who later admitted in court that they'd attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort aimed at checking its archive of 100,000 improvised explosive devices collected in the war zones, known as IEDs, for other suspected terrorists' fingerprints.

Monday, August 24, 2015

I have continued to struggle with the idea that there are so many people out there remaining silent, remaining indifferent, to the horror taking place at Planned Parenthood. The Center for Medical Progress videos are laying it out for all to see and yet, outside of certain social media circles, it seems not to be gaining any traction, seems not to be having any real effect on certain segments of the population.

I'm stunned by it.

I opined elsewhere just a few days ago that it would be difficult to counter the mindset that would call Americans today's equivalent of the German townspeople surrounding the concentration camps.

For me, this picture [of the staff at Auschwitz relaxing and having a great time] symbolizes all average folks who ever lived during times where particularly dark shades of evil gripped societies. It reminds me that though today we can see through the distance of history the thick pall of darkness that overshadowed the world in which these people lived, many of them could not see it themselves when they were in the midst of it. Like being in a city with air pollution, it’s easy to think that the air is clean and fresh when you’re standing in it; it is only when you get some distance and look back that you can see the dark cloud looming over where you were, and know that you were breathing soot all along.

I tend to be an easygoing, optimistic person who focuses more on my little corner of the world than the macro issues of the day. I tend to want to believe the best about people, and guard against buying into hyperbolic rhetoric that makes generalizations about the activities of certain groups of people being particularly heinous — so often, upon reasonable analysis, that type of claim pans out to be nothing more than a lame attempt to vilify people you disagree with.

So I wonder:

If were a 31-year-old woman with three little kids in a busy house in Germany 1941, would I have fully understood the evil that surrounded me? As a woman living in 2008 I can see the horror that was going on there, but at the time there were some awfully sleek lies being told about the situation; it would have been really, really convenient to let myself be persuaded by the lies and just make the nasty little problem go away by telling myself that it wasn’t really a problem at all.

What if I were living in a time and place in India where it was common and accepted for wives to be burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyres? Or living in Rwanda when an entire race of people were murdered by their neighbors? Or a citizen of pagan Rome where newborn girls were frequently “discarded” with hardly a second thought? The people in those times and places had cheery, sunny days, went to birthday parties and get-togethers with friends with lots of yummy food, and had daily lives not terribly different than our own. There are no records in any of these cases that indicate that average people fully comprehended what was going on around them or were as outraged as they should have been at the atrocities in their midst.

It is sobering to realize that the odds are that I would not have been one of the very few people who saw it all for what it was.

Sobering indeed.

She goes on to describe what she believes would be a tell-tale sign that a society is dabbling in serious darkness:

What litmus test could you offer that would apply to all places and all times as a way for a person to look around themselves with completely clear eyes, piercing through even the thickest fog of self-delusion and widespread cultural acceptance, and see that they are surrounded by grave evil? Is there any simple way for a person to immediately undergo an earth-rocking paradigm shift in which they look up and realize that the world around them is not what they thought it was?

One thing that stands out in all these examples is that the victims of the widespread evil were categorized as something less than human. In fact, though the exact level and degree of evil that took place may vary, one thing that unites all of these practices as worthy of a place in the Human Depravity Hall of Fame is not only that innocent people were killed or enslaved, but that their humanity was taken away by the societies around them.

Jennifer Fulwiler's piece is nearly 7 years old and yet speaks completely to the circumstances surrounding the CMP videos.

I ask those of you still reading these words the same question I'm asking myself, what are we doing about what's taking place around us? What more should we be doing?

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

We all lead busy lives... we all have different passions... we all see the world through our own filtration systems and perspectives and so it makes sense that in many respects, our priorities will be different, our order of things important distinct and dissimilar.

Despite those differences however, there ought to be some things that rise to the top of what we as humans deem to be significant and meaningful and one would think that one of those significant and meaningful things, despite our diversity in passions and perspectives, is in fact not a thing at all.

We call them babies.

I'm a father of two, a grandfather of one. I've held all three within moments of their respective births. I suspect many of you reading this have done the same with your children, your grandchildren. I recognize, in the miracle that is the birthing process, that the mother's vagina isn't some magical or enchanted organ through which something passes initially as inhuman and subsequently as human. Any thinking person, despite their backgrounds, their origins, their passions and perspectives, would have to agree. To disagree is to be considered a fool, an idiot, a buffoon. The product of conception, that tissue mass, that clump of cells is a baby... a baby in the womb.

What's it going to take? What events have to occur before we as human beings raise our collective voices in condemnation and denunciation?

In the fifth of a series of videos from the Center for Medical Progress, a woman identified as Melissa Farrell, director of research for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, discusses contributing to the organization's "diversification of the revenue stream" and the potential to "get creative" with conditions for procurement needs. The video was reportedly filmed in April at a Planned Parenthood facility in Texas.

"Just depending on the patient's anatomy, how many weeks, where it's placed in the uterus ... we're going to potentially be able to have some that will be more or less intact and then some that will not be," she says.

"But it's something that we can look at exploring how we can make that happen so we have a higher chance," she adds.

"And we've had studies in which the company, or in the case of the investigator, has a specific need for a certain portion of the products of conception and we bake that into our contract, and our protocol, that we follow this. So we deviate from our standard in order to do that.

"If we alter our process and we are able to obtain intact fetal cadavers, then we can make it part of the budget, that any dissections are this, and splitting the specimens into different shipments is this. I mean, it's all just a matter of line items," she says.

No Ms. Farrell, it's not just a matter of line items. these aren't merely intact fetal cadavers. These are human babies created by God with innate dignity and and worth that you and your cohorts are killing and butchering for profit.

To date, I have not embedded any of these videos for a variety of reasons. One, you can find them yourself pretty easily. Two, I'll confess that I've not watched one in its entirety yet. I can't stomach it frankly.

Nevertheless, we must be shaken from our complacency. Our lives cannot be so busy that we don't see this for what it is. Our perspectives and passions must come together for the sake of the innocent... for the sake of these tiny human beings in the womb who represent the essence of innocence.

With nearly 60 million abortions over the last 43 years, I understand that we are very likely at any given moment to be within earshot of someone directly or indirectly involved in an abortion and that because of that possibility, we are inclined to do or say nothing that might be deemed to be offensive or off-putting to them.

Much care and prudence is called for here, this I know with certainty. But we cannot remain silent any longer, we can't allow our fear of offense to quell a much needed public outcry.

We cannot allow our fear of offending each other override our fear of offending God Himself.

Today, I call heaven and earth to witness against you: I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live...

It's time for people of decency to let others hear about what Planned Parenthood is doing. It's time to speak up. It's time to say something to our representatives in Congress, to those tuned in to social media, to our family and friends, that enough is enough.

In Missouri, women seeking an abortion at the one open abortion-providing clinic in the state have to make two trips to the clinic, 72 hours apart: The first is to receive counseling that “includes information designed to discourage her from having an abortion,” the Guttmacher Institure says, and the second after the required waiting period is for the procedure.

The Satanic Temple says that the restriction places an undue burden of one Missouri member, identified by the group only under the pseudonym of “Mary.” Late last week, the national group and the local Missouri chapter of the Temple were raising funds for potential legal costs, as well as meals, transportation and day-care costs for “Mary’s” child, according to a video posted by St. Louis Satanic Temple head Damien Ba’al.

The Riverfront Times spoke to “Mary,” who did not use her real name in the interview. She’s a 22-year-old mechanic who lives four hours away from the state’s Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis:

“I personally would have liked to have the procedure done as soon as possible,” says Mary, who’s nearly 12 weeks pregnant. “But with all the difficulties, how hard it is do this, it’s been put off for several weeks. If you’re right on the edge of the state you’ve got to go 500 miles just to get to St. Louis, and you have to make arrangements.”

As an adherent to the principles of the Satanic Temple, my sincerely held religious beliefs are:

My body is inviolable and subject to my will alone.

I make any decision regarding my health based on the best scientific understanding of the world, even if the science does not comport with the religious or political beliefs of others.

My inviolable body includes any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry so long as that tissue is unable to survive outside my body as an independent human being.

I, and I alone, decide whether my inviolable body remains pregnant and I may, in good conscience, disregard the current or future condition of any fetal or embryonic tissue I carry in making that decision.

I regard any information required by state statute to be communicated or offered to me as aprecondition for an abortion (separate and apart from any other medical procedure) to be based onpolitics and not science ("Political Information"). I regard Political Information as a state sanctionedattempt to discourage abortion by compelling my consideration of the current and future condition ofmy fetal or embryonic tissue separate and apart from my body. I do not regard Political Informationto be scientifically true or accurate or even relevant to my medical decisions. The communication ofPolitical Information to me imposes an unwanted and substantial burden on my religious beliefs. My informed consent is based solely on information you provide which, in the exercise of yourindependent medical judgment, is materially relevant to my health (excluding the present or futurecondition of any fetal or embryonic tissue inside my body) and is scientifically true and accurate. Myinformed consent is not based on Political Information.

This letter constitutes my acknowledgment that you have offered Political Information to me. I rejectthat Political Information because it offends my sincerely held religious beliefs. Please attach thisletter to any forms you are required to keep regarding my informed consent.

The doctor-patient relationship is built on trust. I trust that you will honor my religious beliefs andkeep me fully and accurately informed of my health based on science, not politics. I further trustthat you will not deny me medical care because of any inconvenience my religious beliefs maycause to your ability to provide me with your best independent medical judgment.

Rawlings-Blakes’ spokesman Howard Libit responded late Sunday saying that the mayor had been taken out of context.

“What she is saying within this statement was that there was an effort to give the peaceful demonstrators room to conduct their peaceful protests on Saturday. Unfortunately, as a result of providing the peaceful demonstrators with the space to share their message, that also meant that those seeking to incite violent also had the space to operate. The police sought to balance the rights of the peaceful demonstrators against the need to step in against those who were seeking to create violence.”

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

In a saner time, the questions Ryan wants to raise are exactly the ones we should be debating. I think the answers would still come out against him, but Enlightenment reason has as only one of its themes the corrosive destruction of enchanted medievalisms. Isn’t it another theme of Enlightenment reason, the positive one, that we need deep concern for our policy choices, deep research about sociological impacts, and profound thought about the effects on political foundation?

In a world where an Indiana pizza parlor can be shut down—then receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations—for what was in essence not even a crime of wrong action but wrong thought, we have moved into a world of metonymy, where an argument is judged not by its argumentation but by its symbolic place.

You could trace all this through the sadly hilarious videoof Ryan’s having his microphone cut off on an MSNBC program this March. An even more recent spat shows the pattern, as well. On April 15, a not-bad profile of Ryan appeared in the Washington Post. The writer’s voice was mostly one of bemusement that someone not obviously insane could oppose same-sex marriage, but within the confines of that voice, the piece was respectful and interested. As schools are wont to do, his old high school, the Friends School of Baltimore, put on its Facebook page a link to this profile of one of its increasingly famous graduates—only to replace it quickly with a message from the headmaster groveling over this failure to grasp the true inwardness of the bigotry and evil manifest in his school’s former student.

The most ironic part may be this: Opposition to same-sex marriage is commonly caricatured as a religious prejudice, and against such prejudice stand the forces of reason, rational argument, and thoughtful debate. But on the ground, where Ryan has taken his stand, it’s far too often the supporters of same-sex marriage who are reacting religiously—symbolically and metonymically, in horror at the evil-mindedness of their opponents. And Ryan who has quixotically, naively, and old-fashionedly assumed that this is all a debate about public reason, rational choice, and political theory.

Excellent piece... read it all... but know what Mr. Bottums' bottum line is.

Marriage as we know it will soon be completely redefined and it'll have nothing to do with reason. It instead will have everything to do with emotion.